Economies and efficiencies in operation dictate that paper roll products such as rolls of toilet tissue or toweling be produced in large single-color batches and that the rolls produced be loaded into shipping cartons or containers immediately after production. This results in the containers being filled with rolls of a single color. Hundreds, if not thousands, of containers will be so filled and the end result of such an approach is that the manufacturer has produced large quantities of shipping containers filled with towel or tissue rolls of a single color.
Often, however, the customers buying such products wish to have a variety of colors in a single carton. In order to satisfy this desire, it has been standard practice to assemble together a number of cartons, each of which contains articles of a single color differing from the color of those in the other containers. Employees then manually remove a predetermined number of the rolls in any one carton and replace them with rolls from one or more other cartons so that a desired color mix is obtained.
It will be appreciated that this procedure is inefficient, time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, employees soon find a repetitive task of this nature to be boring, making an inherently inefficient operation even more so. The likelihood of mistakes being made also increases over time, which means that the color mix of the cartons or containers may not be that actually desired.
A search of the prior art located the following United States patents U.S. Pat. No. 5,007,521, issued Apr. 16, 1991; U.S. Pat. No. 4,678,393, issued Jul. 7, 1987; U.S. Pat. No. 5,230,206, issued Jul. 27, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 5,161,665, issued Nov. 10, 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 5,129,206, issued Jul. 14, 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 5,193,685, issued Mar. 16, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 5,096,355, issued Mar. 17, 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 5,060,455, issued Oct. 29, 1992; U.S. Pat. No. 4,044,897, issued Aug. 30, 1977, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,637,066, issued Jan. 25, 1972.
The above-identified patents disclose various article-handling and/or packaging arrangements for a wide variety of products. None of the devices in this prior art, however, concern themselves with, or are appropriate for, the efficient automatic repackaging of articles in containers in order to modify the mix of articles therein so that an accumulation of articles having different predetermined physical characteristics is established in each container of a group thereof.